The Wimbledon Championships have always been one of the great social events of the British summer calendar, especially for those people lucky enough to visit leafy SW19. Increasingly though, the pervasive use of the Internet and smart-devices has made Wimbledon a global social phenomenon, as millions of fans post social media snippets and images across Twitter, Facebook, news sites, blogs and video sites.

Join the technology team behind the 2013 Championships to learn how they analysed 6.6 million tweets to uncover where the global conversation was greatest and what was being said, which players have the greatest global reach and influence, and how players were perceived throughout the tournament. The session will be particularly relevant to data visualisation fans, and to those interested in how the global nature of Twitter can relate to events with a specific location – in this case an iconic sporting event.

The session will be presented by Chris Thomas, IBM’s Solution Architect for the social media analysis system used at Wimbledon 2013. Chris has worked extensively with public sector clients to develop analytics solutions around social media, streaming data, identity management and unstructured data in general.